The widespread use of single-occupancy vehicles (SOVs) in modern industrialized societies is known to be a significant cause of several major economic, social and environmental problems including the inefficient use of energy resources, higher than necessary traffic congestion and higher than necessary levels of air pollution.
The alternatives of mass transportation, telecom muting or non-congesting/non-polluting modes of transportation are only available to limited segments of the population. A universal alternative to the use of SOVs is the use of high-occupancy vehicles (HOVs), where multiple individuals share a single vehicle. A system to determine which individuals should share a vehicle must analyze the locations of the origins (e.g., homes) and destinations (e.g., places of work) of all the individuals within its scope and group people together based on how close together they live and work, the departure and arrival times, and the available routes suitable for each individual. Alternatively, people can also be grouped to share a vehicle based on the extent to which all of their origins and destinations lie on a straight line, though this approach is subject to inherent inefficiencies when a diversity of individuals are included.
Several existing products, primarily Internet websites, provide ride-matching services such as the website Carpoolworld. None of the existing products, however, include a complete and maximally efficient ride-matching process.
It is, therefore, desirable to provide a complete and maximally efficient ride-matching process that provides selective ride-sharing among multiple users along an optimized travel route.